They tried to tell us all years ago, didn’t they? The car is on fire and there is no driver at the wheel. Confronted with the newest GY!BE album, perhaps the problem isn’t that they are right, perhaps what’s worse is that they have always been right. It’s the end times but maybe, just maybe, it always has been. Maybe we only just started paying attention to what was going on around us.
For a band as consistently steadfast as GY!BE, so committed to the revolutionary struggle as a means of forming a certain kind of subjectivity, what does it mean to make a record in COVID lockdown? The band’s response to all of this can perhaps be summed up by borrowing a line from Mao: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” And so, in such a situation, why change what you’ve been doing? You almost certainly have more opportunities now as contradictions become ever more visible. Thus, once again this four-track and multi-movement album with two twenty-minute tracks interspersed with two shorter tracks. The opening track A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) is a reference to the intelligence alliance of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, suggesting the band's interest in the global structures of power hasn’t merely followed the biopolitical problems of COVID but is rather a far deeper understanding of the structures of modernity being used for surveillance and control. Where figures like Agamben slid into paranoid fantasies about new world orders, GY!BE are taking the Agamben-inspired idea of the state of exception and putting it to use. The track opens with two minutes of static and radio chatter (a deeply welcome return of the field recordings used in the earliest albums) before shifting into what sounds almost like a slightly fuzzy Hendrix guitar solo. There’s a tension here but six minutes in there comes a properly chugging guitar line which is like GY!BE writing music for a fight scene. There’s a deep well of discipline of form here when the melodic and thematic patterns are well established because sometimes there isn’t a break and what is needed is not a grand climatic struggle but the ability to just keep going and to find in the midst of noise the resources to keep marshaling effort to the desired goals. We are, and always will be trying to make the world better and so the opening track is a musical exhortation to just keep on going. We don’t just have to imagine a better future, so much of the opening track is about what we could imagine, not just our needs but our capabilities. No wonder at live shows you’ll see on the projectors behind the band the scratchy lettering of the word HoPE.
In the back half of the track, the emotional tenor thickens, with the addition of a beautiful string section -- violins offering some melancholy to cut against any sense of triumphalism. Hope is never simply a positive emotion -- we must both hope against the world and for the world simultaneously, both an affirmation and negation of what is, and what is still to be. In the final minutes of the track what sounds like birdsong can be heard whilst in the distance explosions boom through the mix, forming a potent aural example of both the Utopian idyll we yearn for and the violence that both destroys our shared life-world and impedes Utopian struggle. Fire At Static Valley, the following shorter piece opens with what sounds like sirens just on the edge of hearing -- the sound of the state of emergency we’ve all been living through in the last few years. The guitars are far colder here, almost lonely, while in the background all that can be heard is a menacing drone. If the track that opened the album was the sound of what could be if we win, then this is the sound of the cold world in which we lose the future, a desert world in which oil refineries burn in the distance as families flee looking for water and breathable air. Government Came, the next twenty-minute epic opens again with radio chatter, the band taking the temperature of the cultural moment. In their album notes, they write of the ways in which turning on the radio revealed a new intensification of the things they had heard in their first two albums:
the apocalypse pastors were still there, but yelling END TIMES NOW where they once yelled "end times soon".
and the transmission-detritus of automated militaries takes up more bandwidth now, so that a lot of frequencies are just pulses of rising white static, digital codexes announcing the status of various watching and killing machines.
and the ham-radio dads talk to each other all night long. about their dying wives and what they ate for lunch and what they'll do with their guns when antifa comes.
You can hear cries of Hallelujah and muted conversations in the opening two minutes of the track and the first few movements carry on this sense of desolation. It sounds lonely, the sound of rooms lit entirely by the bluish light of screens, hands pressed against warm glass instead of the hands of those who we loved and needed. As it stretches on, the track becomes something immensely cathartic and has a violin crescendo which honestly gave me goosebumps, switching the affect of the track from lonely isolation to a joyful collectivity. Once again, much of it is held together by the discipline and sheer force of the music, the drumming particularly being key to large stretches of this piece. We’ve all lost so much, all been through what we thought was unimaginable, but listening to GY!BE is a reminder of that WE. No matter how alone you are, we experience this together not in spite of our differences and separateness but because of it. When the final movement kicks in, the wonderfully named ASHES TO SEA or CLOSER TO THEE it is so definitely joyful, a moment of possibility and potentiality made by another absolutely stunning violin melody line it is impossible to listen to without a smile on your face as the sound of bells draws things to a close.
The album is finished off with another shorter piece OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H). It is a gentle, almost wistful track that reminded me Moya Sings 'Baby-O'.. taken from the end of their second album, sharing that track's gentle utopian suggestion. It is the sound of the calm after the storm, the peace won through that discipline of struggle, and is completely lacking the sinister tensions of the earlier Fire at Static Valley. The album is about waiting for the end but the end is also the beginning too. We are in the midst of struggle, often violent and grim but this final track is a reminder of what might start at some point in the future. What might blossom from the wreckage of capitalist modernity? We have to win, but what good is that winning without something to be won, remade, and pulled from the rubble? Again, the track is dominated by some achingly beautiful violin work that refuses to resolve, ending on a shining note of possibility.
much love to all the other lost and lovely ones,
these are death-times and our side has to win.